Journalists are in the same madly rocking boat as diplomats and statesmen. Like them, when the Cold War ended, they looked for a new world order and found a new world disorder. If making and conducting foreign policy in today's turbulent environment is difficult, so is practicing journalism.
In medicine as well as in romantic poetry, it is the heart that is the center and controlling mechanics of life. If the heart stops, life stops. The loss of sight doesn't not mean death. Yet for ages, the eyes was believed to contain a human being's vital essence - a not wholly irrational belief.
Like other Americans, U.S. journalists have often neglected the study of history; they have much remedial work to do in trying to understand who did what to whom, why and when - and who did it first.
My years with failing vision have prompted me to learn about the nature of the eye and the incredible gift of sight, which I had always taken for granted until it began to slip away.
The new history is really ancient history newly discovered. Journalists are taking crash courses in the blood-drenched background of Serbs, Croats, Bosnians, North Ossetians, Armenians and Azerbaijanis.
Rationally, I was convinced that the universe without God made no sense, but that simply was not the same as believing. But I also knew that I could not argue myself, or be argued, into faith.
